Glossary of Home Theater Terminology

Glossary of Audio, Video and Home Theater Terms

There is a very large vocabulary of technical and descriptive terms that go with home theater. We've included the terms that you are most likely to encounter. If you are very technically involved you may find some of the more technical terms omitted from our list.

Fiber-Optic Cable - A cable containing a glass
fiber for the transmission of light impulses. The light impulses
carry a signal which is nearly impervious to interference and
resistant to signal loss.

FireWire - aka IEEE 1384. A high speed connection
technology associated with computing and with digital video cameras.
Some high-end components are beginning to come to market with
a FireWire jack.

Fixed-Pixel Display - Digital
televisions that have a set number of pixels. Any non-CRT based
display is a fix pixel display, including LCD, DLP, LCoS & plasma.
Using LCD as an example most LCD flat panels have a pixel array
of 1280 x 768.